* Terje Bless wrote:
>This would of course mean we're firmly comitted to Apache as the web server,
>as opposed to “anything that provides CGI”, but I wonder if this isn't the
>case anyway. Has anyone actually tried running this under non-Apache servers?
There were people announcing they got earlier versions of the Validator
running on IIS, for example. As far as `check` is concerned, anything
providing CGI support should work.
>And if we're requiring Apache2, possibly it might make sense to require
>mod_perl2 while we're at it; which would let us target the code at that
>(instead of healf-heartedly trying to make it sorta work, sometimes).
It does not make much sense to me to depend on something without a clear
idea of what benefit that might provide. For Perl 5.8.x it solves a
couple of I18N issues that would be quite difficult to solve using
earlier versions. If there are similar good reasons to depend on Apache2
and mod_perl2 that might be okay, too. Doing it just for the fun of it
would be a bad idea. Our primary concern should be that it works on our
development machines and on validator.w3.org which means that it can
depend on pretty much anything that runs on the platforms we run; if it
works on other platforms that's nice, if people can provide good patches
to make it work on other platforms, that's nice too, but that should not
be a requirement.
>In a similar vein, I wonder what people feel are the important OSes to
>support? I'm thinking Win32 is still a ways off (possibly as far off as S:P:O,
>but at least not until post-0.7). That leaves Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X as the
>obvious candidates (Mac OS X has some special requirements above your average
>*BSD variant). What are the main distributions of Linux and *BSD that we
>should aim for? What are the currently deployed and relevant versions of those
>distributions?
We should try to avoid depending on code that won't work on specific
mainstream platforms, but I do not think we should officially support
anything but validator.w3.org/qa-dev.w3.org (in terms of testing,
commiting to fix bugs in our dependencies to make them work elsewhere,
etc.) Nice if people do that, but lack of properly tested support on a
specific platform should not hinder us to release a stable version of
the validator, the ability to run local installations only affects
a minority of our users.